The GENES Blog (GEnealogy News and EventS): Top stories concerning ancestral research in Britain, Ireland, and their diasporas, from Irish born Scottish based professional family historian, author and tutor Chris Paton. Feel free to quote from this blog, but please credit The GENES Blog if you do so. To contact me please email chrismpaton @ outlook.com.

SAFHS Inventory of Scottish Graveyards goes online

The inventory essentially lists the whereabouts of all known monumental inscriptions collections, both published and unpublished, from information supplied by several family history societies across the country, as previously co-ordinated by the SAFHS Graveyard Working Group. The data available includes information on the location and documentary evidence of burial grounds across the country, with details including OS map grid references, religious denomination, years when burials were first known to commence, the FHSs holding the records and much more, though it does not contain actual inscriptions. As a tool, it is one of the most useful in the Scottish genealogist's toolkit, so this is a great move to place it online.

Previously available in CD format, the last edition (the 2nd) was published in 2008. I'm unclear as to whether this is the data from that publication, or if it has been updated, but will update in due course when I find more. Even if the data is that from the 2008 edition, there are details of some 3500 burial grounds included, which should certainly be able to help most people!

The online presentation arranges the records alphabetically by county, parish and burial ground name(s). Using the search fields above the list you can instantly jump to the area of interest. The database is free to access.

UPDATE: This is currently the 2008 edition, but each family history society has been asked to provide an update on any new publications produced since then, the details of which will be added to the database. Once this is done the plan is to then update the database every six months or annually.